Page 99 of Tell Me Something True

“She was very forthcoming.”

He bet.

“My family was curious about you,” he said, giving into the urge to move, to work off some of his once again building anxiety by picking up his beer and taking another drink. Swinging the bottle in his hand. “About how we knew each other.”

“I imagine they were.” Her pause was long and charged and had his instincts screaming that he needed to take cover because shit was about to go down. “Considering that up until I moved here, they hadn’t known I even existed.”

Guilt tried to worm its way through him, wiggling its way into the spaces cracked open by his lingering anxiety. He shut that fucker down.

He hadn’t done anything she hadn’t done first.

“We were together for a year,” he pointed out, “and you never introduced me to any of your friends. You never told me about your past except that you’d grown up in Pittsburgh in foster care. You never shared one aspect of your life with me. Nothing that was real. And now you think you have the right to be pissed that I didn’t tell my family about you?”

She looked at him with an expression that was half pitying, half frustrated. “That’s not why I’m angry. I knew you never told them about me when we were together. Did you think I didn’t? Anytime they called or Facetimed and I was there, you either didn’t answer or went into another room. You went home for birthdays and holidays and never asked me to go with you. When any of them visited, you made sure I wasn’t around. God, you really must have thought I was an idiot.”

“I didn’t think that,” he said, quick and rough and honest. “Not once. And I didn’t tell them because my family was going through a difficult time. My older brother’s fiancée cheated on him with one of his friends, and they called off their engagement. Silas was getting into worse and worse trouble and Eli was struggling in school…”

But even to him those all sounded like lame excuses.

Worse. They sounded like lies.

“That’s why I didn’t ask you to come home with me. But I would have told them,” he insisted, desperate to prove he was telling the truth. Desperate to believe it himself. “I was going to tell them, but then you left and there was no need.”

The look she gave him let him know she thought he was full of shit.

Hell, he couldn’t even blame her for it.

“Like I said, I’m not angry you didn’t tell your family about me. Or because you said I wasn’t important enough to discuss.”

“I didn’t say that.”

But he had said their relationship hadn’t been important.

He lifted his bottle. Took a long drink, trying to wash away the sick taste of shame coating his throat.

“I’m not even angry you told them I was guarded,” she went on as if he hadn’t spoken.

“Jesus.” He ran his hand through his hair. “Did Kat take fucking notes?”

“What bothered me,” she continued, ignoring him, “was that you said all of that after everything you told me on the sidewalk this morning. You can’t have it both ways.”

Her voice shook with the first hint of the anger she’d told him she had.

He shouldn’t be proud of her for it.

Shouldn’t be grateful she trusted him enough to feel safe getting pissed at him.

But he was both.

“You don’t get to accuse me of lying when you’re not telling the truth,” she said firmly. “And you don’t get to hold our past over my head when you withheld just as much from me as I withheld from you. When you made just as many mistakes. When you’re just as much to blame for what happened between us as I am.”

He set his beer down on the counter with a sharp thud. “I’m not the one who left.”

“No. You weren’t the one who left. You were the one who bought an engagement ring.”

Chapter 19

Jesus. Talk about kill shot straight to the heart.

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